From the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of Possession a deeply affecting story of a singular family. When children's book author Olive Wellwood's oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of a museum, she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends. But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house--and the separate, private books she writes for each of her seven children--conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined. The Wellwoods' personal struggles and hidden desires unravel against a breathtaking backdrop of the cliff-lined shores of England to Paris, Munich, and the trenches of the Somme, as the Edwardian period dissolves into World War I and Europe's golden era comes to an end.

About the Author

A. S. Byatt is the author of numerous novels, including the quartet The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman; The Biographer's Tale; and Possession, which was awarded the Booker Prize. She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels & Insects; five collections of shorter works, including The Matisse Stories and Little Black Book of Stories; and several works of nonfiction. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she lives in London.

“A stunning achievement: a novel of ideas that crackles with passion, energy and emotive force. . . . I did not want The Children’s Book to end . . . I wanted more of this ambitious, compelling novel, certainly Byatt’s best since Possession, and possibly her best ever.” —Patricia Hagen, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Sweeping. . . . A literary feast. . . . Byatt fills a huge canvas with the political and social changes that swept the world in those years . . . She elicits great compassion of the individual beings caught in that tableau. It’s not a tale you’ll soon forget.” —USA Today

“A rich and ambitious work, steeped in ideas and capped with a lacerating final act. . . . Byatt’s penetrating, unsentimental style hits its mark. [The period] details are never less than fascinating.” —Time

“A complete and complex world, a gorgeous bolt of fiction. . . . The magic is in the way Byatt suffuses her novel with details, from the shimmery sets of a marionette show to clay mixtures and pottery glazes.” —The Atlantic Monthly

“Only Byatt could stuff this massive book so full of detail, character, and history while never losing track either of human feelings or of the sweeping, precipitous decline of the culture she documents.” —The Onion A.V. Club

“Uncompromisingly erudite. . . . Like Possession, The Children’s Book is a tour de force of literary chameleonism and social history. . . . [It] brings to vivid life the often irreconcilable demands of being an artist and being a human being.” —The Wall Street Journal

“So well-researched that The Children’s Book could well have been a consummate history of the [Edwardian] era. . . . The book brims in rich pictorial description . . . But more than that, Byatt’s book is an astute moral lesson.” —Chicago Sun-Times